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Art Pick: Girl Interrupted

This week, Vince Aletti reviews the Guggenheim’s survey of the brief, brilliant career of Francesca Woodman, the photographer who committed suicide at the age twenty-two, in 1981. He writes, “Like so many precocious young artists, Woodman’s primary subject was herself, a convenient, malleable model, happy to pose in the nude. But her self-portraits are rarely about her; like Cindy Sherman, she used photography as a way to disappear into a cabinet, a tree trunk, a peeling plaster wall, or her own contorted flesh. Photographing herself alone in an abandoned house, she was a lithe Everywoman—tortured, bewildered, withdrawn, flirtatious, courageous. She imagined herself as a goddess, a fury, an angel, an animal, a demure young girl. She seems at once fearless and in shock.” The exhibition catalog, the most comprehensive monograph on the artist to date, includes an insightful essay by the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and some hundred and eighty reproductions.

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